Response and click-through-rates (CTR) to online offerings are key concepts in the monetization of contemporary Internet activities. Examples of such online offerings include, but are not limited to: search engine results, advertisements, commercial product and service offerings, social game offerings, movie offerings, music offerings, travel offerings, vehicle offerings including cars, trucks, RVs and motorcycles, jobs offerings, etc. Many Internet site providers, e.g., search engine providers, social networking providers, etc., rely almost exclusively on advertising for their revenues. Much of this revenue is tied to the delivery of potential customers to other Internet sites, as measured by CTRs. The overall CTRs for offerings vary but are generally in low single-digit or a fraction of a percentage point. Hence, even a modest improvement in such low CTRs can have enormous impact on revenues.
Online offerings have different forms and appearances but all share the common property that the ultimate desired outcome is a response by a user (someone viewing the offering). For example, search engine sites such as Google™ include ads in search results returned to users in response to user queries. The ads are typically displayed in a reserved area of the page containing the search results, and often are clearly separated from so-called organic results, which are typically displayed in the middle of the page. Search engine providers often go to great lengths to delineate ads from organic results and convey to users that organic results are completely independent from the ads. On the other hand, the search engine providers may also operate popular and pervasive advertising networks, such as Google's AdSense™, which are used to provide ads to millions of Web sites. Even after clicking upon organic results, it is very likely that users will encounter ads provided by these advertising networks. Other examples of online offerings, apart from search engine results and ads, include offerings for commercial products and services, social games, vehicles, travel, video, music, movie, jobs, etc. In connections with all such offerings, various website providers include so-called sponsored results, which are also a form of offering. In summary, all such offerings, which may appear different, are actually a form of an online offering where the ultimate desired action is a response by a user.
In order to improve response rates and CTRs, Internet site providers have created behavioral profiles of users based on the types of pages and ads they view. Tracking of users by various means such as cookies or click histories can contribute to the creation and tailoring of such profiles. Likewise, social networking providers use data supplied by users during creation of accounts and common/typical Internet/social network activities (e.g., page views, “likes”, comments, posts, messages, etc.) to build profiles of the users and their interests. Such profiles are then used to target offerings that are presented to the users.
Despite these attempts to deliver relevant ads the above-described methods have been met with limited success. Most of the ads shown to users are not clicked and the users to whom they are presented consider many to be irrelevant or uninteresting.
In order to increase the probability that users will respond to online offerings, it is desirable to indicate to users whether some of their friends and other connections in social networks have responded to such offerings. The idea is that an indication of a response to an offering by a friend or other connection will increase trust in the offering, based on the degree of trust the user has in a friend or other connection who have responded.
In US PGPUB 20110093346, Lunt et al describe a method for ranking ads (sponsored search results) using social networking information where ads displayed to a user in response to a search query are ranked by simple counts of clicks on such ads by their friends, within specified degrees of separation in a social graph connecting said users with their friends and other connections, e.g., friends-of-friends, or more distant connections.